Henri Oguike's two new works confirm that when it comes to choosing music, the man is fearless. Both are set to scores that could easily sweep a small dance troupe off the stage - and, in the case of Second Signal, could deafen it. The music here is Japanese taiko drumming, played live on stage, and the size of the drums combined with the musicians' furious attack produces an almost overwhelming sound.

Oguike, however, cleverly chooses to dramatise his battle with the music. His dancers, tensed and hungry as athletes, square up to the drums and to each other in twisting, slamming duets. Goaded by sound, they streak across the stage in hot bursts of speed.

This is dance stripped to hard pure lines, limbs braced and pumping. Yet it never turns into a muscle parade, because, in cutting down his movement so ruthlessly, Oguike clarifies his engagement with the music. We can see how the drummers' rhythms hammer through the dancers' moves, how their sound rises on the swell of the choreography's dynamics.

It ends up as an equal battle, and, by comparison, Oguike's use of Handel's Messiah (in taped extract form) for Seen of Angels looks the tougher choice. Not only has he set himself up with one of the most iconic scores in the repertory, he is also pitting himself against Mark Morris, whose settings of baroque choral music have all but cornered the market.

This work does resemble Morris's in some ways - but that doesn't stop Oguike grappling with his own vision. He has distilled the score into a battle between religious agony and ecstasy, and the result is astonishingly visceral. The flayed intensity of his darker imagery has an almost medieval quality, while certain images of joy - a dancer suspended in a slow fall into light, for example - are dizzyingly euphoric. What's thrilling about Oguike is not just his talent, but the fact that he is pushing so hard to find out what it can do.